I’d forgotten it had taken me twelve hours in 100 degree heat on the train to reach El Obeid from the River Nile.
-African Calliope, Edward Hoagland
Muhammad was the most miskeen, the most wretched drover on my first trip. His riding shirt was the most ragged and he always ate last, having had to run after the most distant wandering camels before they were all hobbled. Once when we were just outside Hamrat al Wiz, he jumped off his camel when he spied a rusted tobacco tin half buried in the sand. He said he could keep his chaw in it, too poor even to afford to buy Abu Fil, Father of the Elephant cigarettes. That old tin reminded me of the story of the Mahdist sword scabbard found after his army was wiped out by the British in the Battle of Omdurman, 1898, that had been repaired with a strip of sheet metal from an imported English biscuit tin.
My cousin Kennett Love was visiting my house in St. Louis the same day my Sudanese friends Hashim and Umalhassan were visiting from Jefferson City. Kennett joined us on the riverside, with a view just upstream from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, which I told Hashim was just like the Mugran al-Nilayn, the meeting of the two rivers in Khartoum.
Kennett asked where they were from and they said Sudan. He asked where abouts in Sudan and they said El Obeid. I’ve been there, he said. Back in the 1960s. Umalhassan and Hashim were quite amazed. They had lived in Missouri long enough to know that few people there had ever heard of Sudan, much less knew where Sudan was, even less El Obeid, much less had ever been there. Me and Kennett, that made two Missourians who had been to their hometown.
Kennett told the story of how he had gone there as a reporter for The New York Times. In those days there was no paved road so only high clearance four wheel drive vehicles could get through. He was in the back of a Bedford lorry with a bunch of men and he was just finishing a bottle of whiskey which he threw out behind. He said there was a great shout and the lorry screeched to a stop, two men raced back to get the bottle, one came back with it and the other empty handed. A glass bottle. Something precious. If he had taken the train like Hoagland he would have missed it.
The Arabic verb to store or to warehouse something is khazzana, which by extension means to chew tobacco, as in, to keep tobacco in one’s mouth. An Arabic noun from this is makhzan, a storage place. The French word magasin comes from this, as does the English word magazine, as in an ammo or gunpowder magazine. I once went to the roof of a department store in Paris and thought of Muhammad chewing his chaw. The view of the Seine was nothing like the Nile and the Galeries Lafayette was nothing like his tobacco tin, or a high capacity ammo magazine like we see today.